Will electric cars end up niche super or city cars?

At present, there are so few electric cars available to buy that you are more likely to spot a £250,000 Rolls Royce Phantom on the road than a battery-powered family car. The recent launch of an electric version of the world’s most luxurious car begs the question: Is the electric car destined to amount to little more than an expensive novelty item?

Two vehicles that hit the headlines this week represent the polar extremes of electric car design, but it is far from clear, which, if either, will prevail. The T.27 is a cheap, mass-produced and ultra-light city car aimed at the mass market whilst the Rolls Royce 102EX is aimed at a relatively tiny group of extremely wealthy individuals. Whilst neither design is yet available to buy, both are working prototypes.

The T.27 electric city car has been created by a designer best known for his work on the McLaren F1 and Mercedes SLR ‘supercars’. Gordon Murray received government funding to develop his T.25 petrol-powered city car into a highly-efficient electric vehicle built using a streamlined manufacturing process known as iStream, which involves panels being formed by welding as opposed to being stamped in a press.

The Rolls Royce 102EX is an electric version of its Phantom flagship. The car has undertaken a world tour as a demonstration of engineering excellence, but the company says it has no plans to put it into production. The car has a performance comparable with its petrol-powered counter, but charging the huge car takes twenty hours.

Electric cars still a niche product

Despite the fact that the potential market for an electric city car is huge, motorists may be reluctant to trade their creature comforts for the relatively cramped and spartan T.27 and at present a production version of the Rolls Royce might find more customers. Electric car manufacturer Tesla has been sluing cars to European customers for two years. The company sold out of its European special-edition Roadster model, which had a 2010 production run of 250 cars and a base price of £89,000. Whilst the total number of Tesla Roadsters is relatively miniscule, the fact that a high-performance electric vehicle that in all likelihood is bought by customers with more than one other car sells well reinforces the perception of electric cars as niche products.

A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA) said: “There is little doubt that over the coming decade electric cars will account for an increasing proportion of the overall fleet. However it’s far from clear how quickly we will have an affordable, five-seater everyday electric car that performs as well as the current breed of clean diesel family cars.”